Order in Chaos

by Jack Whyte

  “Yet we sat safe here, on this island, sheltered from the chaos by the goodwill of one man, Robert of Scotland, and his friends. Of course, we were able to support him in return, from our own strength, limited though that was. And when we leave here today, most of you will continue to support him from your new homes in the lodges we have founded in Scotland, and your strength will hearten him in his time of need, as his understanding and goodwill heartened us in ours.” He tapped his clenched right fist into the palm of his other hand. “But now the King of Scots faces the greatest challenge of his reign. England is set to destroy him utterly, and all who stand with him. I know you are all aware of that. It is not new. England has been determined to destroy the Scots for years now, yet the Scots remain unbroken. I know, too, that you are all aware of the new invasion now being prepared. I wonder, however, if you know the true extent of what is afoot this time.

  “Edward of Caernarvon has assembled more than two and a half thousand heavy chivalry at Berwick. Two thousand and five hundred armored knights, each of them backed by mounted men-at-arms. He has raised four thousand longbows and fifteen thousand infantry troops. He has a supply train of hundreds of wagons, all of them poised and ready to move north at his word. And he has a fleet of ships already sailing up the coast towards the River Forth, where they will wait, with fresh provisions and supplies, until his armies reach them.

  “Twenty thousand men, at modest count, poised to strike into Scotland. And King Robert will confront them close to Stirling, the narrowest point of their invasion route and perhaps the only spot where they might be stopped. The odds against the Bruce’s army, including those of you who choose to stand with him, will be at least four to one, and perhaps greater.”

  He drew the black bag towards him, raising the flap with one hand while he reached inside with the other, and he drew out the great blazing jewel of red and white enameled metal depicting an all-seeing eye atop a pyramid that marked his rank as a member of the Governing Council of the Temple. He held it up for them to see, suspended from its heavy chain of silver links.

  “I set this aside last night, in chapter, for the last time, laying down my role and rank as Knight Commander of the Temple Council. I will not wear it again because for now the Council has ceased to exist and I see no reason to replace it, since we are so few. And so I speak to you now as plain Sir William Sinclair, one of you—no more and no less. I have done my duty as prescribed, with the help of my own counselors, and all the arrangements are in place for our dispersal as a community, everything as planned, and for the good of all.

  “But now I find that, as a man, I am far from happy and farther from content. I am, in fact, sick at heart. We have changed ourselves outwardly, disguising who we were. We have accepted what has been done to us, in silence and without open protest. We have been meek, and turned the other cheek, accepting undeserved shame and degradation from the hands of those we once were proud to serve. Well, I have had my fill of that!

  “Pride is a sin, they tell us. But those very speakers, in their arrogance and pride and greed, have stripped us of everything that made us men and dutiful monks. So if pride be a sin, I am prepared to die in sin, rather than live in shame.”

  As he stooped to his bag again, he heard a growl of discussion arising among his listeners, shockingly loud in this chamber where silence was an inviolable rule, but he ignored it, pulling out a folded square of cloth, which he shook out and held up to their eyes.

  “I doubt any of you will recognize this thing, so I will tell you what it is.” He held it higher then, above his head, stretching it between both hands to show it clearly: a broad band of black forming the top half, against the lower half of purest white. “This was the first baucent to grace our banners, before we adopted the cross pattée. This was the Temple’s standard in our earliest days. It represented the choices and the changes we had made in embracing the brotherhood of our Order: the black of former ignorance replaced by the white of enlightenment. This banner symbolizes everything we were and marks the progress that we made in assuming the responsibilities of brotherhood: from darkness to light, from ignorance to awareness, from despair to hope, from ignominy to honor. A simple standard, but containing more than we ourselves could ever voice.”

  He lowered his arms and stood a moment gazing at the banner, then raised it again, spreading it wide once more.

  “I had this from the hand of Master de Molay himself, the last of its kind from the last of his kind. He gave it to me when we two last met, seven years ago, and bade me take good care of it and bear it with me everywhere. Look at it well, for you may never see it again. I am taking it to Stirling, to raise it in the cause of Robert Bruce. And I will go there as a Templar, fully armed and armored in my true colors—the white of knowledge and the black cross pattée of my Order’s glory. I have had enough of hiding and dissembling! Enough of skulking with a lowered head! This King in Scotland intends to make one last, defiant stand, and I am going to stand with him, in defiance of Pope and Church and Kings of France!”

  The roar of approval had begun before he finished speaking, drowning out his raised voice, and he waited, motionless, his arms still high, until it had subsided.

  “Will you come with me?”

  This time the noise was pandemonium and the crowd began to sway as men turned from side to side to pummel each other, roaring with enthusiasm. He stood smiling, waiting, and eventually they stilled themselves again, staring at him hungrily.

  “So mote it be, then. But hear me! No red crosses, for this is no crusade.” He lowered his arms, folding the baucent again with measured care, then draping it lengthwise over his left shoulder. “We will ride as Templars, knights and sergeants, in black and white, and for the last time. As who and what we are, in pride, and in defiance of all who have disowned and betrayed us. Knights to wear their white mantles, with black armor. Sergeants will wear black surcoats, with the white cross pattée. All shields, the same—white cross on black. And the same for horses’ trappings. The two stone buildings at the rear of this house contain all of those, and there is paint, both black and white, to use as required.” He eyed them now, seeing them straining like hounds at leash.

  As he answered the few questions, Will was aware that the formal gathering had changed into an extended council of war, the planning of a campaign. He dealt rapidly with the timing of the matter—it was already the third week of May, the testing date of Midsummer Day mere weeks away. But everything had altered. Instead of riding piecemeal to support the Bruce as mounted individuals, they would now move as a powerful, unified force of heavy chivalry reinforced with disciplined light cavalry. Of the four weeks between now and Midsummer Day, therefore, two would be spent in renewed training on Arran, regaining their former battle skills as a single, cohesive entity. At the start of the second week of June, they would transport their various units, under the command of de l’Armentière as vice-admiral, from Arran to the mainland. Their two-day sailing route would take them up the estuary of Clyde to Dumbarton, where they would disembark and strike overland, eastward across the thirty miles to Stirling while avoiding being seen by any English forces that might be in that area. Two days at sea and four days on the march over the rough terrain between Dumbarton and Stirling: sufficient time to put them within easy reach of King Robert well before the English arrived.

  He held up his hands.

  “So, Brothers, it is decided, and so mote it be. We will ride as Templars once again, one final time in honor of our Order’s ancient glory, and we will make our presence seen and known, in support of the one man, the single King, who has treated us with honor and compassion, Robert Bruce, the King of this Scots realm. And if we die in what we are to do, what matters that? Our Order is already dead, and so we will but ride from death, into death. Go, then, and make yourselves ready.”

  He had spoken in French, and as he fell silent one single voice, its owner unseen among the throng, took up what he had said, repeating it in measured cad
ence, “From death, into death,” and as he shouted it others joined him, until all the men assembled there were shouting it. “From death, into death!”

  “Go, then!” Will turned and crossed to the stairs against the rear wall without looking back, and as he went he heard the sounds of moving feet as the assembly broke up, the shouted chant finally dying to silence. He had no notion that he had just witnessed, indeed initiated, the birth of a legend that would be retold down the years, the tale of how a company of unknown knights, like a deus ex machina from some improbable Greek tragedy, had swept down, in the moment of Scotland’s greatest need, to turn the tide of King Robert Bruce’s greatest battle from defeat into a glorious victory. Instead, as he climbed the stairs to the gallery above, he was thinking about wearing his armor once again, and about sending Tam Sinclair to bring Jessie to him from Lochranza.

  EPILOGUE

  ONE

  Stirling Castle sat solidly on its great stone crag, dominating the wide flatlands below, where the River Forth wound in great serpentine loops through the far-flung, treacherous bogs known as the Carse of Stirling. On a clear, moonlit night, the sentries on their high walkways might have been able, if they chose to look, to discern the black clump of the distant Tor Wood, knowing that beside and beyond it lay the stillchurned ground along the Bannock Burn, and, if their imaginations stirred at all, they might have recalled the chaos and the slaughter that had occurred there mere months earlier, when King Robert had wreaked havoc on the overwhelming numbers of the invading English.

  They had thought of it before, and talked of it in great detail—every man in Scotland had—rejoicing but unable to believe the miracle that had happened there on the banks of the Bannock on that Midsummer Day, when it seemed that the massed schiltroms of Scots spears would be incapable of halting the surging, implacable English advance; when King Robert himself, attacked and challenged to single combat between the armies, had come close to death, saving himself only by his own dauntless skills and the unerring sweep of a mighty thrust of the battle-axe that had been his only weapon.

  And they had recalled the sudden, unforeseen appearance of a fresh Scots army, led from the west by heavy chivalry, an irresistible charge of heavily armored Temple knights—more Templars than had ever been seen in Scotland—that had tipped the balance of the day and thrown the densely packed masses of the English, chivalry and common soldiery, into fleeing, destructive panic, trampling and hampering themselves and their own, killing one another in their desperate attempt to find safety and solid footing in the slippery, murderous bogs between the Bannock Burn and the banks of Forth. They foundered there in the killing muck, drowning and dying in their thousands in the panic-stricken crush and leaving the Bruce and his men victorious …

  But that had been in midsummer, months earlier, when the amazing victory was bright and fresh in the mind of every Scot and it seemed the golden light of joy would never fade. On this night, though, there was no hope of such a thing. Men had the reality of freezing winter to keep them mindless of such thoughts tonight. The cloud mass was so low that it boiled over and between the battlements as a swirling, icy, roiling fog, impervious to the wind and rain that lashed through it to flail at the castle’s palisaded walls. The miserable sentries stood hunched in whatever shelter they could find on their walkways along the sheer drop of the giant crag’s side, each man measuring the slow passage of time remaining until his relief, when he could shed his sodden cloak and escape from the brutality that howled across the flat and open miles from the Firth of Forth and the too-close, cold North Sea.

  Within the stone walls of the central keep, however, no one knew or cared about the weather outside. The interior of Stirling Castle that late-autumn night was warmer and brighter, the atmosphere more joyous and carefree, than it had ever been in the memory of anyone who was there. Torches flared all along the interior walls, illuminating every entry, passageway, and stairwell, and within the enormous rooms on the main floor, the darkness was banished by massed banks of blazing candles, augmenting the flaming cressets on the walls and the giant fires that blazed in every fireplace. People thronged everywhere, all of them dressed in their finest clothes, with scarcely a piece of armor to be seen, and music swelled up from every direction, some of it fierce and warlike, some of it bright and brilliant, and all of it melding and blending distractingly in those places where differing sounds overlapped.

  One such place was the wide flagstoned passageway that led from a suite of smaller anterooms to the massive, iron-studded oak doors of the King’s Hall, the castle’s largest and most ornately finished room. Will Sinclair had gone to collect Jessie from one of the anterooms set aside for ladies’ use, and most particularly for those ladies’ women and children, nursemaids and suckling infants. There had been a harpist playing there, soothing the babies’ cries with gentle music, but as Will and Jessie moved away, bound now for the King’s Hall, the sounds of the harp were quickly drowned in the skirl of wild, Gaelic music spilling from the narrow gap between the slightly open doors of the great chamber.

  The two of them were alone in the passageway, walking easily, Will with one protective and possessive hand on Jessie’s waist, when the great doors ahead of them swung open and the wailing music suddenly crashed through the widening space, engulfing the approaching pair. Will stopped abruptly, his eyes widening in surprise, and without thinking, he grasped Jessie’s arm gently above the elbow and drew her aside to stand beside him with her back to the wall, watching what was happening.

  A solid block of garishly colorful Gaels now filled the open doorway, five wide and occupying the entire space behind the towering figure of the saffron-and-scarlet-clad man in front, and all of them were blowing mightily on the wild bagpipes that were so much of their ancient, traditional way of life. Will could not see how dense the files of clansmen were behind the first rank, but he could see roiling smoke above and behind their heads from the fireplaces in the great hall at their back, and had the impression of masses of people swirling behind them, laughing and shouting in enjoyment and encouragement.

  The man in the lead began to pace on the spot, raising his right knee high and beating time with one foot to set the tempo as the tune they were playing changed into another. Six times he brought his foot down on the floor, and then he began to march forward, his cheeks bulging with the effort of keeping his air bag full, frowning in concentration as his fingers flickered over the holes in the long pipe that produced the notes of the melody. As he passed in front of Will and Jessie, Will was astounded to hear that every man behind him was playing the same tune, keeping and sustaining the tempo perfectly. As they marched past him in a solemn phalanx, Will counted twenty men in the block behind the tall leader, and as the last rank passed him he turned to watch them go, aware that behind him the crowd was now spilling through the doorway, shouting and cheering and whistling.

  When the sound of the pipes died away, Jessie smiled up at him.

  “I never was able to make the French believe that the sound the pipes make is music,” she said. “Who were those men? They have obviously practiced playing together like that. My guardsmen in France could never do that.”

  He grinned at her, lowering his voice to where only she could hear him. “Your guardsmen in France had other things to occupy them, my love. But you’re right, nonetheless. I didn’t know that could be done. Twenty men, all playing together and keeping the tune. I never thought to hear the like. But then, I’ve been told the Romans used the same kind of pipes, though smaller. Apparently they used them to keep their men inspired on long marches, so they must have known how to play in unison like that, now that I think about it.” He straightened up and scanned the crowd around him, few of whom were known to him. “Anyway, they were all MacDonalds. The big fellow at their head was Calum MacDonald of Skye, and he’s Angus Og’s shadow, so that means Angus himself must be inside with the King.” He reached down and took her hand in his, placing it on his arm. “So then, wife, shall we go
in?”

  Lady Jessica Sinclair saw no trace in her new husband of the grim and forbidding Templar knight she had encountered on that now distant day in La Rochelle. The William Sinclair who walked beside her now was another man altogether, tall and imposing as ever, but clad in a tunic and tight-fitting hose of the latest French style, in pale blue velvet from her own stores and made by her own hands. The yoke and padded shoulders made his width immense, and the tunic glittered, front and back, with silver studs, sewn onto lozenges of satin that was the mere hint of a shade darker than the tunic itself, while from his shoulders, sweeping down his back, was a magnificent cloak of light blue shimmering silk that she had bought years earlier from a merchant who had traveled widely in Asia and brought back the most wonderful fabrics she had ever seen. She knew that she matched Will in splendor, because she was still wearing the dress in which she had been wed earlier that day, a deep-bosomed gown of dark blue, its cuffs and bodice edged with French lace identical to the delicate lace that formed the now-raised veil on her high headdress.

  Will, for his part, was highly conscious of Jessie’s presence by his side, and of the still not-quite-accepted reality that she was now his spouse and consort, their marriage sanctified by the rites of the Church earlier that afternoon. He cupped his free hand more firmly over hers as they made their way to the door, and people parted to let them pass, many eyeing them with open curiosity. Will knew none of them, but he knew much of their curiosity must spring from the fact that they knew nothing of him, save that he had emerged somehow from obscurity as an established friend of King Robert, highly enough regarded by the monarch to have been wed in Stirling Castle, with the King himself in attendance to witness the event and share the celebrations.

  Will and Jessie paused just inside the doors, scanning the vast, crowded room. An open aisle, roped on each side, stretched from where they stood to the far end of the hall, where it ended in a shallow flight of steps leading to a broad platform. Above their heads, the high, vaulted roof of soaring, hammered beams was barely visible, shrouded in darkness and flickering, hazy shadows reflected upwards into the drifting smoke clouds by the lights below. But it was the distant platform that captured their attention, for there, above the crowd, stood Robert I, by God’s grace King of Scots, surrounded by, but distinct from, the small group of people attending him, and backed by a line of attentive heralds trumpeter.